The semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) industry has experienced rapid growth. Technological advances in IC materials and design have produced generations of ICs where each generation has smaller and more complex circuits than the previous generation. However, these advances have increased the complexity of processing and manufacturing ICs, and for these advances to be realized, similar developments in IC processing and manufacturing are needed.
In the course of IC evolution, functional density (i.e., the number of interconnected devices per chip area) has generally increased while geometry size (i.e., the smallest component (or line) that can be created using a fabrication process) has decreased. This scaling down process generally provides benefits by increasing production efficiency and lowering associated costs. Such scaling-down also produces a relatively high power dissipation value, which may be addressed by using low power dissipation devices such as complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) devices. CMOS devices have typically been formed with a gate oxide and polysilicon gate electrode. There has been a desire to replace the gate oxide and polysilicon gate electrode with a high-k gate dielectric and metal gate electrode to improve device performance as feature sizes continue to decrease. However, an n-type MOS device (NMOS) and a p-type MOS device (PMOS) require different work functions for their respective gate structures. One conventional approach is to use metal layers with different thickness to properly achieve different work functions for the metal gates of the PMOS and NMOS devices. However, the metal layers are difficult to be adjusted in thickness due to a tiny filling window. Another conventional approach is to use an ion implant operation to adjust the work function of the metal gates, but poor conformity occurs due to the shadow effect of a FINFET structure.